by Frank McLynn ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 1, 1994
In time for the centenary of Stevenson's death, this weighty biography ballasts the romantic version of his life, from his wild youth in Edinburgh to his exile in Samoa, with an integrated appreciation of Scotland's best writer. Historian and biographer McLynn (Hearts of Darkness: The European Exploration of Africa, 1993, etc.) is a good match for Stevenson and a doughty partisan for his literary worth, which suffered posthumously from both the hagiography encouraged by his wife, Fanny, and from subsequent Bloomsbury debunking. Now, with later champions like Borges and Nabokov and recently renewed biographical interest, Stevenson can no longer be dismissed as a children's author with adult crossover appeal or a dilettante with a Byronic talent for living more interestingly than he wrote. McLynn balances a historian's thorough research with well-chosen excerpts from Stevenson's letters, essays, and verse, whose grace makes an unflattering contrast with the biography's tone-deaf prose. McLynn intimately depicts Stevenson's sickly childhood in Edinburgh (particularly the Calvinist nurse who had an acknowledged effect on his imagination), bohemian university days, early literary career, and later travels. The writer's life took an unlooked-for turn when he met Fanny Osbourne, a married American with a frontier temperament, misplaced artistic aspirations, and neurotic possessiveness-or at least that was the opinion of his friends, particularly editor and poet W.E. Henley, who famously fell out with Stevenson after he set out for Samoa to improve his health. In the Pacific Stevenson outdid Melville, at least with the Samoans, who accorded him heroic status. The book is marred toward the end by McLynn's undisguised antipathy for Fanny and her clan, whose demands are blamed for Stevenson's stroke and the lower quality of his South Seas writings. (For The Collected Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson, see p. 1347.) Nonetheless, Stevenson's charm is visible in every letter and essay quoted in this noteworthy biography. (16 pages b&w photos)
Pub Date: Dec. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-679-41284-0
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1994
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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